meet the author - Page 7 of 19

Meet the Author: Mary May

Posted on July 3, 2018March 20, 2024 by Kara Uhl

Perhaps the best way to describe Mary May, author of “Carving the Acanthus Leaf,” is to describe another woman – Grace. Grace began as an 8” x 10” x 21” block of mahogany, and emerged not with plan or intent, but with patience, skill and curiosity.

On her blog, Mary wrote about the process of carving Grace without referring to a model – a process called “direct” carving. “A woman was in there somewhere,” Mary wrote. “I just needed to begin chipping the wood away and find out where and who she was.”

20170211_184759_HDR-e1489671111806 — “Grace”

And so it is with Mary herself. A carver was inside her, always – that’s evident in her childhood stories of three-dimensional play and carved zucchini dolls. But just as Mary handled Grace, she has worked her way through life not with a grinder, but rather slowly, with a mallet and chisel. “Without having a specific design, how do you know what is ‘waste’ wood, anyway?” she writes when talking about carving Grace. “This process of slowly chipping away helped me to discover the design as I carved.”

And so it is with Mary’s life. Her life experiences have allowed herself to live three-dimensionally. In fact, her work these days is split in thirds – carving, teaching and creating online videos. And what has emerged is a well-respected career that has allowed her to fill her days doing exactly what she loves.

A Childhood of Fulfilled Dreams & Eccentricity
Mary was born in the Chicago area and grew up in the city’s suburbs until she was 11. Her dad was working as a systems analyst at a time when computer programming was still young. His commute into the city took two hours – each way. “He got really burnt out on that,” Mary says. Wanting to simplify, Mary’s dad quit his job and became an auto mechanic, a job he held for many years.

“What’s interesting is that my dad actually went to college for philosophy and theology,” Mary says. And her dad would argue that having studied both subjects made for a perfect combination for his newfound profession. “In his very unique mind it was the right combination of someone who could figure things out and solve problems,” Mary says.

Mary’s mom collected junk and sold it. “Our entire house was just filled with all sorts of collected things,” Mary says. “I had an interesting childhood. I thought it was a normal childhood, but now that I look back on it, it probably wasn’t.”

XPilgrim I109 — Mary’s family, sitting on her dad’s 50′ trimaran, which he was in the process of building. Mary is sitting on her dad’s lap.

Mary grew up with three brothers and one sister, and their childhood was spent following the whimsy of their parents. Their father’s boatbuilding hobby is a good example.

“He built two different boats, one when I was 4 and the other when I was 11,” Mary says. Once the boats were built, the entire family lived on them. “The second time we were all teenagers – well, I was almost a teenager,” Mary says. “I can’t even imagine what my parents were thinking.”

Mary says her dad, who died in 2003, served in the Navy and she has often wondered if that played a part. He sought out adventure and regularly eschewed the traditional road.

“He was a quiet, normal-acting and -looking person,” Mary says. “But he just had this dream and he wanted to live it and nothing was going to stop him. It was quite an adventure. As a child, I probably didn’t appreciate it much. It definitely was something that was very valuable as to how we developed our way of thinking and of dreaming.”

Xme and ilene110 — Mary (right) with her sister Ilene (left), spent part of their childhoods living on their father’s boats.

While on the first boat trip (they traveled the length of the Mississippi River and then sailed to the Bahamas) Mary says she and her siblings continued their education by taking correspondence courses through the mail. During the second boat trip they stayed in the Florida Keys for six months so the children could attend school.

“We were staying at a marina, anchored, and we were on a serious budget,” Mary says. The marina charged docking fees and utilities, but if your boat was simply anchored, there was no charge. So Mary and her siblings would pile into a rowboat and row themselves to shore every day to catch the school bus.

“My dad’s quiet way of living his dream had a real significance on my decision-making,” Mary says. “I think the main thing that I gained from it is other people may think your dream is odd and obscure, but if it’s your dream then go ahead and dream it and do what you can to achieve it.”

Mary’s family moved from the suburbs of Chicago to rural Wisconsin when she was 12. “It was a pretty drastic lifestyle change, living out in the country,” she says. When they first moved to Wisconsin they lived in a trailer they had previously used as a summer vacation home. For six months – including a Wisconsin winter – it was as if they were back on the boat, living in a trailer that had no running water. Mary says she remembers going to the neighbor’s house to fill up five-gallon buckets of water and carrying them home. “It was rough,” she says. After six months, they found a new place to live. “It had running water and was a little more civilized,” she says.

Mary lived in rural Wisconsin until she graduated from Sparta High School in 1985. “I really enjoyed the country,” she says. “I enjoyed the quietness of it. My parents were concerned with the influence that the city and the suburbs would have on us so they just wanted us to get out and experience the rural life.”

Learning to See in Three Dimensions
From a young age, Mary loved shaping three-dimensional things. And her mother’s collected junk gave her much to play with. She remembers shadow boxes that intrigued her, and Strawberry Shortcake wrapping paper, in particular. At 7 or 8 years old Mary remembers cutting out the little images of Strawberry Shortcake, making arms and sticking them on, adding dimension to what was previously flat. She became acutely aware of the closeness of things, the thickness of things, how objects could look farther apart and then appear closer to the background.

“I was interested,” she says. “It was a training ground. I started to view and visualize things, and I think that was a real plus. I don’t think my parents had a clue where that would lead me but it was interesting.”

She calls herself an obsessive child who had a tendency to latch onto projects. Once, while living on the boat, she asked her dad for all of the boat’s dimensions. She wanted to draw an exact replica of the boat, scaled down on paper. Her dad taught her how to use the scale ruler and she spent hours replicating the boat, every tiny detail – she was 11.

While Mary was surrounded by a lot of creativity growing up, compliments and encouragement were rare. “My dad, especially I think, was not a man of very many words and it was very hard to get any kind of response at all,” she says. “When he did encourage you, you thought, Wow. I’m going to grab and hold onto that one. They just expected us to succeed in whatever it was we were doing. They expected us to be good at whatever we did.”

Mary loved hanging out with her dad who was a hobby carpenter. One time, at the age of 12, she was out in the garage with her dad and told him she wanted to make a dollhouse. “My dad helped me get plywood and taught me how to use the scroll saw to cut out the windows and how to use the hand drill,” she says. “I made my first dollhouse and it was pretty rustic but it was mine. I think that was probably the first time I built something in wood. I sold it at a garage sale for $8.” She wishes she had kept it.

Mary began carving at a young age, although not in wood. In her book she tells a story about carving a pumpkin in Wisconsin (and also a delightful story about carving her name in her dresser). “I kind of always did that kind of thing,” she says. “We had huge zucchinis that would grow in the garden, beyond the point of being edible. I’d carve faces into the ends of them.” The necks of these dolls would weaken, turning the zucchinis into bobble heads. “I’d walk around with the bobble head and eventually it got so weak that the head would fall off and that was pretty traumatic.”

The Art of Making the Complex, Simple
Mary attended college for two years, but was undecided about her future. She took a class in ceramics that she loved – because it was three-dimensional. She knew she wanted a career in art, but she hadn’t yet discovered carving wood, specifically. And the idea of living her life as a starving artist offered little appeal.

During her second year of college Mary studied abroad in London. “That’s when I ended up absolutely falling in love with stone and wood carvings,” she said. Now, when she looks back at the photographs during her time abroad, she sees a theme – photo after photo of carvings and architectural details from the insides of churches and cathedrals. “It’s interesting to look back to see what you gravitated toward and what you didn’t,” she says. “You can look back and kind of locate those things.”

Mary wasn’t a good student. “I didn’t take notes very well,” she says. “I would take an entire page of notes where I would make everything three dimensional with the letters coming off the page. I never paid any attention to what the teacher was saying, but I would have pages of these very bizarre, three-dimensional notes.

Feeling like she wasn’t heading in any specific direction and not wanting to spend more money, Mary dropped out of college and enrolled at a technical college. For two years she studied desktop publishing – what is now called graphic design. “I ended up working at the school that I studied at as a desktop publisher,” she says. Her job was to assist tutors and redesign old, worn-out, hand-drawn and handwritten instructional packets. Think: a manual teaching someone how to change a tire.

“I think that really, really helped writing my book,” she says. Mary wrote “Carving the Acanthus Leaf” with a layout in mind. And although she’s never studied teaching, designing instructional packets at the technical college required her to think as a teacher would. “What I try to do is remember back to when you first start doing something,” she says. “I really try to get into their heads and into their position of being a beginner.”

There’s an art to making the complex seem simple, and it’s an art Mary excels at, as is evident not only in her book, but also in her classes (ask any of her former students) as well as her instructional videos. Her goal, when teaching in person, on video or on paper, is to take out any possibility of misunderstanding while also creating an increased interest in the work, all the while crafting a simple explanation of what actually is a complex idea and design.

Creating a Career Out of Carving
Mary began carving while working at the technical college. She bought a beginning woodcarving book at a garage sale, a large curved gouge and a rubber mallet. Her workshop was in her bedroom. It was during this time that she started taking classes two nights a week with a Greek master carver named Konstantinos Papadakis.

“The more I started to carve, the more I was attached to it,” she says. “I couldn’t get away from it. Even when I was at my job and trying to do these learning packets, I was constantly thinking what I wanted to carve. I think it just became an obsession.”

And this is why Mary was so happy to be laid off from her job with severance pay. “I was really trying to figure out how to do the carving full time and I couldn’t come up with a way to do that and be a responsible citizen,” she says.

XStone Corbel 3edit — Mary carving a leaf detail inside of a limestone bracket in Malaysia.

She traveled to Athens, Greece, this time to Theofanis Andravidiotis’s studio, where she worked alongside master Greek carvers and their apprentices. From there she traveled once again to London, where she attended City & Guilds of London Art College, studying traditional carving designs and techniques. She also did a stint working as a stone carver in Malaysia. (You can read much more about all of this in her book.)

While Mary loved the training, she said she did have to go through a bit of a punishing period where you had to prove yourself. And then she fast-forwards for a moment, mentioning how often people want to become a master carver after taking one week-long class. “It’s difficult to convince people you’ll need a little bit more time,” she says. “You have to put in the time.”

Xicon stand131 — Mary’s Byzantine-style icon stand.

When living in the states, work, at times, was sparse. Mary would do occasional sign carvings as well as spec pieces, including the Byzantine-style icon stand featured in her book. Mary found it difficult to get her name out, and difficult to prove to people what she could do. So she simply continued working on her skills and techniques until a man she was dating convinced her to move down to South Carolina. “That’s when the work really started to open up because of the area and the historical significance in Charleston,” she says.

In South Carolina, after some time, Mary found lots of work repairing and restoring furniture, as well as working on new homes along the coast. But the work wasn’t immediate. The key was convincing people of what she could do. Many builders and homeowners didn’t realize, for example, that a hand-carved fireplace mantel was a possibility. So Mary had to put herself out there, presenting herself in a way that was starkly different from the person she used to be.

“I was actually a very shy person,” Mary says of her childhood self. “I think there was a big part of me that needed to get over my shyness to function in the world. I had to force myself to get out there and go traveling. And I did a lot of traveling on my own and forced myself to get out and interact with people. It helped me through that – when you realize if you want the chance to live a successful life, you kind of have to get past that.”

Mary’s also tough. She circles back to her childhood, to the six months she lived in a trailer with no water. “I knew I could survive in pretty sparse living conditions,” she says. “I was willing to do that [again], to put up with whatever came my way, to live as frugally as possible, to take on a second job, to take on another real job – fortunately I never had to do that then.”

Xumbrella stand103edit — Mary’s first commissioned piece, a butternut umbrella stand.

After finally landing in a comfortable place of steady work doing what she loved, Mary did have a concern. If this was something she was passionate about and loved to do, what would happen when it became her career? Would she lose the passion once her hobby became her business? Her concern, it turns out, appears to be unfounded. “Twenty-seven years later I still absolutely love it,” she says.

“An Enjoyable Adventure”
Flexibility and creativity have been important to Mary’s success. “There are times when I don’t have a lot of commissions, when I don’t have a lot of work, and I have a lot of time to think and get creative,” she says. “[I think:] I want to continue to do this as my job. How else can I look at this? Maybe I can go this direction, maybe I can do teaching, start an online video school. And that’s how I started the online school. I didn’t have a lot of work six years back and I wanted to keep doing this. But how?”

The key, Mary says, is to not get burned by doing one thing and one thing only way too long. “It becomes repetitive,” she says. “You get burned out. With the variety that comes with my work there are very few times when that happens.”

Mary still lives in South Carolina, but not with the man who initially convinced her to move down south. (There is a lovely story about how she met her now-husband, Stephen, in her book.) For the last 16 years she and Stephen have lived on a couple acres in the country on St. John’s Island.

When they bought their home, it was falling apart. “The person who built it was about 4’11”, and all the ceilings were short,” she says. “He basically built it to fit his height.” So Mary and Stephen, who works as a private contractor, completely redid the house. “It was a fun process,” Mary says. “My husband did a lot of the restoration and renovation. We only have a few items in the house that I actually carved. It’s really like the cobbler’s house.”

And whenever Stephens’s work was slow, he would work on Mary’s workshop, every couple of years adding another extension. “It’s a beautiful little workshop,” she says.

Xexplain_feet_IMG_3435

These days, Mary’s work consists of teaching, at different locations and occasionally in her workshop, working on her online videos and working on commissions. Last year, finishing up her book added another layer of work on top of her busy schedule – she found herself up until midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., sometimes 3 a.m., every night plus weekends. “I’m still recovering from that,” she says. The work did, however, prompt her to take a one-week-long cruise with her sister. “Then my sister convinced me to do a back-to-back cruise, so we did another week and it was very irresponsible. It was one of those things I used to do before I was married.”

Her days are often similar. The mornings are reserved for computer work. She helps Stephen with his bookwork, does his invoices and catches up on email. Then she heads out to her shop to work on her commissions. “Sometimes I can spend 5 hours or 10 hours a day, depending on how critical the deadline is,” she says. “Occasionally, if I’m working on a commission, I like to video it so I can include that as a project and a lesson on my online school.”

She’s not good at taking breaks. “I sort of forget and five or six hours later I realize that I haven’t stopped,” Mary says. “But it’s funny because I had some students here taking classes and at 10 a.m. in the morning they wanted to take a break and I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And they asked, ‘Where are some chairs to sit in?’ And I said, ‘Chairs? What do you mean? We don’t have any chairs around here.’ And I realized, oh my goodness, I don’t stop. So I went to the Dollar Store to buy some chairs so they could sit and take a break.” She laughs.

Filming her work requires three cameras, all of which are set up in her workshop. “They’re just on tripods,” she says. “I’m pretty much here by myself.” She likes it that way. She has a computer in her shop and because she’s by herself, she says she can take as many takes as she wants. “When I mess up I don’t have to waste anybody else’s time,” she says.

Mary’s oldest stepson, Caleb, is her video editor. “He’s the one that makes me look good,” she says. “He did say he’s saving all the bloopers. I’m not sure what I’m going to get, a blooper reel? He takes all of them and he does a great job of making sure whatever camera angle is correct and zooms in and it’s all pretty much real time. It’s in-house. I do the videos and Caleb does the editing. We keep very busy with that. We do a video every week. It’s going really well. There’s a lot of interest and I’m excited to see a lot of beginners get into that.”

When asked about her hobbies, Mary says she enjoys gardening but she’s not very good at it. “I’ve been asked, ‘What do you do for fun?’ And I’m like, I have to think of something clever. The first thing I thought of was carving. ‘What do you do for fun?’ My career. I thought it was sort of the best answer I could give. I really couldn’t think of anything else.”

She still loves to travel. “We’re kind of homebodies here,” she says. “But I like to travel and I hope to travel a lot more. My husband likes to come with me occasionally when I teach in different locations.”

And thinking both in terms of flexibility and creativity, Mary has been considering a new idea – a mobile workshop, that would allow for travel, videos on the road, interviews and workshops in different parts of the country. “If I have too much time on my hands, I can see different ways to steer it,” she says.

Mary finds satisfaction in all her work’s dimensions. “Carving itself is very enjoyable and I get to lose myself for hours,” she says. “There’s a different type of satisfaction when you’re teaching. And there’s still something different of just being able to share – other people get just as excited. I get the occasional email from students and I’m thrilled with what they’ve done. I love that part of it.”

When looking back on her life thus far, Mary gives God a lot of credit. “I acknowledge that God gives us gifts and I think you need to realize where the gifts come from and my gifts do come from God,” she says. “I think ultimately life is a challenge but you can take those challenges on and actually turn them around as an enjoyable adventure. I think that’s probably how I have survived as many years as I have doing what I really love to do.”

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

This is Not a Breakup Letter

Posted on November 24, 2022November 24, 2022 by Lost Art Press

I’ve been writing a woodworking blog almost every day since two-thousand-and-good-god five (2005). I pretty much have the hang of it now. And I’m happy with its mix of content, the variety of authors and its “voice,” for lack of a better word.

I have no desire to throw a monkey wrench into the works.

And yet, I’m 54. I have fewer years ahead than behind. And there are things that I desperately want to attempt, as both a writer and a woodworker. So for 2023 I will conduct an experiment. I’ve started a blog called “The American Peasant” on Substack.

If you’ve never heard of Substack, it’s a blogging platform that offers a paywall and is writer-friendly.

“The American Peasant” is the working title of my next book, and the blog will document its development in weird and somewhat dark detail. I’ll be posting the process behind the process. Draft chapters. All the construction drawings and SketchUp files and cutting lists I make for the projects in the book. All the dead ends that have no place in the book but are interesting to visit. The tools I am developing and modifying for this book. Plus the raw research – how I find information, chew it up and poop it into a book. Also, all the business decisions (and mistakes) that go into making a book in the hardest way possible.

I’m sure you have questions.

Q: Why not just post all this stuff here on this blog?

A: I want this blog to carry forward as it is. What I’ll be writing on “The American Peasant” will be raw, personal and less polished. The reader might encounter naughty words. Difficult ideas. And Unfiltered Schwarz. Here’s a concrete example: This book began when I took some psychedelic mushrooms on a German farm. Lost Art Press should appeal to a large swath of woodworkers. “The American Peasant” will not. For the first month or so, “The American Peasant” will be free for everyone so you can figure out if it’s for you.

Q: Why put it behind a paywall?

A: “The American Peasant” will be a lot of work for me. We try to give away as much information as possible at Lost Art Press for free. And we pay our authors generous royalties that are unheard of in corporate publishing. That’s why I have to teach classes and sell furniture – to make ends meet in my household. In other words, Lost Art Press is not some cash cow. The revenue from “The American Peasant” will go into the coffers at Lost Art Press to continue to support the difficult way we do business. Plus, I think the content will be well worth it.

Q: How much will it cost?

A: I’m still working on that. Probably $5 a month.

Q: How does it work?

A: It’s an email subscription service. Once you subscribe, you’ll get an email containing the entire entry every time I post. You’ll also be able to search the archives of past entries.

Q: You said this is an “experiment.” What does that mean?

A: This might fall flat. If it’s not worth the effort, I’ll pull the plug after a year, and readers will get a refund.

Q: When will it begin?

A: Now.

— Christopher Schwarz

‘A Few Usually Useless Woods’

Posted on December 12, 2023December 8, 2023 by fitz

Hickory bast seating. This chair was 22 years old when these photos were taken. The upper surface is polished from sitting; no finish was applied. The underside looks like it did in 1997.

In 1978, Drew Langsner released his book “Country Woodcraft” to the world, and it sparked a movement – still expanding today – of hand-tool woodworkers who make things with mostly green wood.

The 304 pages of “Country Woodcraft” showed you how to split wood from the forest and shape into anything you might need, from a spoon to a bowl, from a hay rake fork to a milking stool, a pine whisk to a dining table.

After more than 40 years, Drew revisited this long-out-of-print and important book to revise and expand it to encompass what he has learned since “Country Woodcraft” was first released.

The result is “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now,” which has been expanded by nearly 100 pages and has been updated throughout to reflect what Drew has learned since 1978. Among many other additions, it includes greatly expanded sections on building shavehorses, carving spoons and making green-wood bowls.

The original book’s text is intact, and the old photos are in black and white. Throughout the book, Drew has added text, which we set in a slightly different font, to explain what he does differently now after 40 years of daily work on the North Carolina farm he shares with his wife, Louise.

In many ways, the book is a delightful conversation between the younger Drew, who is happy to chop down trees with a felling axe, and the older Drew, who now uses an electric chainsaw and band saw to break down stock to conserve energy (and likely aspirin). New illustrations and color photos throughout show how Drew works now.

Below is an excerpt from the Appendices.

A Few Usually Useless Woods – Then
Trees are generally defined as single-stemmed woody plants that attain a height of at least 20′. The smaller shrubs are often a nuisance to commercial woodsmen. Unsurprisingly, certain shrubs contain excellent-quality wood. Like roots and branches, the irregular sections can be used to advantage in specific situations.

In rural Finland, lilac is considered to be the best material for rake tines. Rhododendron makes fine spoons, shelf brackets and clothes hooks. Holly, generally planted as an ornamental, will grow into a fair-sized tree with excellent-quality hardwood.

Roots are generally not considered wood. They are often gritty (dulling sharp tools), difficult to work and hard to adapt to profitable production. They are a stringy fibrous material, with shrinkage and other characteristics shared with the wood above ground. As might be anticipated, peasant and nomadic craftsmen found special uses for these tough, twisted subterranean forms. The natural curvatures of roots are used for hooks, handles, and other special uses. Knotty roots are also tough and can be used for maul heads – hickory and dogwood – or even bearings for slow-turning machinery. The Swiss Alpine butter-churn stand is traditionally made of dry pine roots.(1) Large spruce roots, cut with the lower trunk, are used in boatbuilding.(2) Finer spruce roots can be split into lacing thongs or basketry material. During a recent project removing roots in our driveway, I learned that roots have reaction wood, just like tree trunks and limbs.

Country Workshops 2017 summer intern Will Burney is using a drawknife to remove the outer bark from a tulip poplar sapling. The tree is about 5″ in diameter.

Bark, another waste material of industrial technology, has many uses for the woodland crafts worker. Birch bark has surprisingly fine, lasting qualities when wet. It can be peeled in early summer, then used for the hull of a canoe or the underlayment of a sod roof. Birch bark baskets are made throughout Scandinavia and northern Europe. Tulip poplar bark can be scored and folded into containers such as berry-picking boxes. Basswood bark was used for making shingles in Russia and other places. The inner bark – called bast – of hickory, bass and tulip poplar can be cut into strips for post-and-rung chair seating and to make a tough, durable lacing material, and even rope. Leather tanners used bark from oak, birch and alder as their source for tannin. In nearby Greeneville, Tenn., Cecil Self and his brother were tanning cow hides for horse harnesses with oak bark until about 1970.

Even twigs and small limbs can be useful. Fences can be woven from many pliable species; willow and hazel are often considered best. First-year willow growth is the standard basketry material in many areas. Young pine limbs may be shaved down and used for bucket hoops. Birch twigs and many kinds of brush are used to make broom sweeps.

Before the takeover of industrial economics, trees, shrubs and even roots were valued for many uses that have since been superseded by synthetics and manufactured products. The following list provides a few examples from traditional handcrafts of Europe and North America.

Bark – Entire, or Outer
· Alder. Tanning leather
· Birch (white, paper). Canoes, basketry, roofing (Scandinavia, under sod), clothing (Pacific Northwest native Americans)
· Linden (also known as bass, and lime in the U.K.). Shingles
· Oak (various species). Tanning leather
· Tulip poplar. Primitive shelters, folded boxes
· Willow. Aspirin

Bark Bast (Bast refers to inner bark.)
· Elm. Rope
· Hickory. Chair seating, basketry, thongs and lacing
· Linden (Also known as bass, and lime in the U.K.). Basketry, rope
· Tulip poplar. Chair seating, cordage

Limbs
· Apple, pear and other fruit woods. Spoons, ladles, hooks for hanging just about anything
· Birch (any kind). Spoons and ladles, wall hooks for clothing, harness
· Dogwood, holly and other slow-growing hardwoods. Spoons and ladles
· Pine limbs. Bucket hooping (Swiss Alps)

Roots
· Dogwood. Mauls and clubs (Integral with the lower trunk of saplings)
· Sassafras. Root beer
· Spruce. Thongs and lacing

Saplings
· Hickory and other tough hardwoods. Clubs and mauls, splitting gluts
· Birch. Fencing (Scandinavia)
· Conifers (various). Fencing (Scandinavia)
· Hazel, sourwood and other small saplings. Walking sticks

Shrubs and Scrub Trees
· Lilac. Rake tines
· Rhododendron. Spoons and ladles, wall hooks

Twigs and Rods
· Birch. Besom brooms, rope, fencing
· Hawthorne. Living shrub fencing
· Hazel. Baskets, walking sticks, fencing
· Willow. Basketry
· Any species. Fire starter, fuel for cooking/baking

A Few Usually Useless Woods – Now
Tulip poplar bast chair seating. During the early years of Country Workshops’ ladderback chairmaking classes, we learned that the inner bark from tulip poplar can be used for woven chair seating. The idea was quickly dismissed. It was assumed that poplar bast is an inferior material that would tear or deteriorate quickly. Also, we were in love with hickory bast, which is an exceptional material – for appearance and strength.

Peeling the first strip shows how deep to drawknife the succeeding strips. This piece is looking a little thick.

The problem with hickory bast is getting it. Hickory grows in many parts of the eastern U.S., but it’s relatively scarce in our area, compared with tulip poplar, which seems to sprout almost everywhere.
More than 30 years had passed when I received a phone call from Jack Ruttle, back then the editor of Organic Gardening magazine, and also a participant in one of Country Workshops’ early chairmaking courses. Jack told me that when he returned from the CW course he prepped and wove a seat for his chair using tulip poplar bast.

DL – “Great! How has it held up?”
JR – “That’s what I want to tell you. We use the chair every day.”
DL – “And?…”
JR – “It’s still looking fine. No tears or other problems.”
DL – “OK! That’s fantastic. I’ll give poplar a try, ASAP.”

That summer, Will Burney and I cut a nice-looking tulip poplar sapling. The diameter was about 5″ at breast height; it was straight, with just a few small knots. The pole we hauled to the shop was about 15′ long.

The shaving and peeling technique is the same as for getting hickory bast, only somewhat easier. Like hickory, poplar bark can be peeled from mid spring to about mid summer, during the early year growth when cambium cells are dividing, forming new layers of wood and inner bark. Sometime around mid summer, growth slows, and it becomes difficult – or impossible – to peel the inner bark.

Once in the shop, our poplar pole was set on two sawhorses. Will and I took turns holding the pole and shaving off the outer bark. We used a straight drawknife, held bevel down. We quickly learned that this needs to be done carefully; it’s easy to cut into – and destroy – the bast. Depth of cut is determined by trial and error along a narrow test strip, maybe 2″ wide. We used a chalk line to define strips about 5/8″ wide.

A box cutter – a carpenter’s zip knife – works well for cutting through the inner bark to make the strips. If you do this between spring and summer, the bast will peel loose from the cambium with little effort. If it seems to be too stiff – more than 2mm in thickness – lay the bast back on the pole and do some more shaving. This fine-tuning can be done with a spokeshave. Remove the first strip.

With a strip removed you can see the thickness of the two adjacent sections that will become the next strips. This greatly helps in determining how deep to shave. Use a spokeshave for the final passes.
Because a tree isn’t a true cylinder you’ll need to cheat here and there, letting the strips wander or die out.

Where a strip intercepts a knot there are several options. If the knot is to the side of the strip, you can continue as if it doesn’t exist. There’s about a 45-percent chance that this section will end up on the bottom of the seat, or become overlapped with the weave on the top of the seat. In tension, narrow sections of bast are almost as strong as full-width sections. Sometimes a very small knot will be almost centered within the width of a strip. I leave these; they become a visual feature. You can also just come to a stop, making a shorter strip. Long strips are nice, but you can use various lengths when it comes to doing the seat weaving.

As you proceed, slime from the fibrous bast will attach to the drawknife and spokeshave blades. Wipe this off with a wet rag. Continue working with wet tools. Water seems to minimize slime accumulation. (Dry and oil the tools when you’re finished.)

Let the strips dry before weaving the seat. The fresh strips are somewhat fragile. Also, they will shrink in width. Seats made with green bast will result in gaps in the woven seat. Roll and tie the strips in coils for drying. This might take a week. Coiled bast can be stored indefinitely.

As with hickory bast, the best weaving pattern for poplar seating is a herringbone. A one-over/one-under checkerboard weave becomes too tight to finish the weaving process. A double checker board (two-over/two-under) is OK, but it’s not as attractive as the herringbone.

On weaving day, plop the coiled bast into a bucket of warm water. It becomes pliable in about 15 minutes. Don’t soak all the bast at once; you want it to be workable, but you don’t want it to soak up so much water that it expands in width.
Directions for the herringbone weave, including how to tie strips together with a weaver’s knot, are in my book, “The Chairmaker’s Workshop.”(3)

Both hickory and tulip poplar bast hold up well. With use, hickory bark takes on a nice sheen on the upper surface. (A true butt rub!) Poplar smooths out some, but never looks polished. On my poplar bast ladderback, the material crumpled slightly where it wraps around the rungs. This doesn’t weaken it, but it would be nice to eliminate. Perhaps pre-limbering in both directions will do the trick. As it dries on the seat, poplar bast shrinks in width a little more than hickory. But the shrinkage might also tighten the weave. We’ve been using the chair in the photo with poplar bast seating for three years; we’re happy with it. Still, hickory bast is king.

This tulip poplar bast seat had been used for three years. I’m not aware of any degradation.

A later note on poplar bast seating. Recently I found myself looking at the chair with poplar bast under low level and low angle light. I discovered that the crumples correspond to the arrises of the small spokeshaved flats of the rungs. I’m now quite sure that crumpling would not have happened, or be less prominent, if the upper seating rungs had been made rounder and smoother. This could be done with a hollow sole spokeshave, scraper or just sandpaper.

Wood scraps from a green wood chairmaking workshop. When I visit city-based woodworkers I’m often surprised to see that wood scraps are tossed into the trash, along with package wrappings, the newspaper and even food waste. This is a shameful situation that was even worse before recycling.
During 39 years of Country Workshops’ ladderback chairmaking courses, vast quantities of wet, green wood waste were produced, along with the many chairs. We produced drawknife shavings, followed by spokeshave shavings, plus waste cutoffs from over-long chair parts and wood that didn’t meet standards of quality. There was very little saw and sanding dust. Here’s how this stuff was utilized – and almost everything was utilized, even some of the wood dust.

Dry drawknife shavings from any kind of wood are among Planet Earth’s best fire-starters. Because we and our neighbors mostly heat with wood, we can always use wood shavings. We store drawknife shaving until needed in plastic trash cans – like the ones sold for curbside pickup. (Which we don’t have out here.) I use a 2″ hole saw to bore 50 or so air vents in the plastic side walls. This is for ventilation so that the shavings will dry, which is what’s needed for fire-starters. The trash can lids are nice to use if the shavings are stored outdoors.

One tip that would drive some CW students nuts is that the drawknife shavings are roughly sorted before going into the trash cans. 1. Sweep the shavings into a pile. 2. Grab a bunch of shavings and shake them, so that small, frassy stuff falls away. Don’t shake on top of the shavings pile! 3. The remaining shavings go into the trash can. The reason for this is that the rejected small dusty stuff tends to fall on the house floor and be messy. You’ll appreciate this when you do it.

Spokeshave shavings can go into the same fire-starter. But there’s a much better use if you’re doing woven chair seats… Once upon a time this woodworker/teacher/author rejected the tradition that woven chair seats should have a stuffing between the layers. But as I got older, and learned that even hickory bast chair seats stretch and sag, I came to agree with conventional wisdom. But what to use? Several layers of cardboard is common, and also plastic foam sheeting (various kinds.) One day Brian Boggs was visiting when our class was finishing their ladderbacks. Brian told us that he had been testing “just about everything” for the stuffing and that he had concluded that the very best is spokeshave shavings. By far the best are from green wood when you’re finishing rungs with a spokeshave. Green wood shavings are springy, whereas dry wood shavings tend to crumple and weaken as they pass over the spokeshave chipbreaker.

Sweep the shop floor when switching from drawknife to spokeshave. When spokeshaving is finished, put the shavings into a box to dry. They will keep indefinitely. The shavings are also premium packing material for anything shipped in a cardboard box. Or just put them in with the fire starter.

Green cut-off wood scraps are dried – in other hole-y trash cans – then burned in the shop woodstove. Any other leftovers are tossed in the forest to decompose, which might be what all of this stuff should really be doing. Amen!

1. Drew and Louise Langsner. “Handmade.” New York: Harmony Books, 1974.
2. Herbert L. Edlin. “Woodland Crafts in Britain.” Newton Abbot, UK: David & Charles, 1949.
3. Drew Langsner. “The Chairmaker’s Workshop.” Original edition published in Asheville, NC: Lark Books, 1997. Author’s reprint edition Marshall, NC, 2008.

Meet the Designer: Tom Bonamici

Posted on July 14, 2024July 14, 2024 by Kara Uhl

*Tom Bonamici with his partner, Karen, 2024.*

Tom Bonamici is the designer behind most of our soft goods (plane and pencil pockets, workshop waist aprons, bandanas, chore coats, vests and more). He’s also a woodworker and educator who has climbed volcanoes, attended New York Fashion Week, built privies and is likely on a backcountry motorcycle trip as I write this.

Tom grew up in Eugene, Oregon. He spent his childhood outdoors knocking around Eugene’s urban forest areas wearing moccasins he made after immersing himself in books on Indigenous American material culture, fly fishing with his dad and cruising around town on his bike with friends. He has an older sister, now a journalist in Boston. His mom dipped in and out of various jobs including full- and part-time caregiving, and working at a marketing firm, an organic food store and University of Oregon’s (UO) Clark Honors College. He remembers watching his dad, an academic librarian who spent his entire career at UO’s Knight Library, tying his own fishing flies and making knives.

The closest public school just happened to be a French immersion school. Learning another language served as a good brain teaser growing up, and now helps him navigate Europe, “in my very enthusiastic French, which may or may not be correct,” he says, laughing.

When Tom was about 8 years old his mom took him to REI. A rock climbing gym across the street had set up a little climbing wall in the store. Tom tried it out.

“And I just got obsessed with rock climbing,” he says. “Until maybe 15 or so, that was my life.”

It was the very early days of the Junior Competitive Climbing Association (Tom was member No. 12). He climbed in competitions all over the West Coast, and even went to nationals a few years.

In 8^th grade, Tom got into a bad bike crash. With forced time off from climbing competitions he realized how much more fun it was to simply climb outside with friends. He left the pressure of competitions behind and moved on to alpine climbing and backpacking. He helped start a mountaineering club at his high school. And he did several big climbs – Mount Hood, Mount Shasta and smaller volcanoes in Oregon. He also took some big backpacking trips, including a month-long NOLS course in Wyoming when he was 17.

Tom looks back with a bit of awe at how trusting his parents were, allowing him to head off with friends and adult climbing mentors to climb mountains, take a 12-hour trip to Spokane for a competition or spend the weekend backpacking.

“It was pretty wonderful,” he says. “It showed a lot of trust. I had some really wonderful mentors and learned a lot.”

Dartmouth’s Outing Club & an Education In Timber Framing, Geography & Studio Art

Tom attended Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he was given the freedom to create his own major – part geography, part architectural history, part architectural justice, part studio art. He likes to call it “cities and buildings.” Tom focused on human geography, looking at how the built environment affects people, privileging some and criminalizing others. He took lots of architecture studios. Timber framing and the buildings in New England, so different from where he grew up, inspired him. When Tom asked to forge his own path, the deans at Dartmouth simply asked for a proposal.

“That trust of students still inspires me in my work,” Tom says.

To further illustrate this trust, Tom shares a story. In middle school, he took a class at a cycling center and got really into fixing up old bikes. At Dartmouth, he noticed abandoned bikes locked up on bike racks for months on end. After about a year, he decided to liberate them. His intent? Fix them up for friends. While liberating one such bike a campus police officer showed up. Tom explained.

“Yeah, I can tell that it’s abandoned but you can’t just take it,” the officer said.

Long story short, Tom ended up in a room with one of the deans. He braced himself for consequence but was instead met with curiosity. The dean asked him to put together a proposal for a program for abandoned bikes, and Tom did. It included a budget, storage solutions and how they would be distributed via the college’s cycling club. Tom says the abandonment of hard-and-fast rules for trust, responsibility and accountability in that moment was eye-opening.

Tom largely chose the college due to the Dartmouth Outing Club, “which is this wonderful storied institution that started in 1909,” he says. It’s student driven, and nearly a quarter of the college’s students are members. In addition to networks of trails, shelters and cabins, the Outing Club offers nearly every outdoor program you can think of, from water sports, skiing, hiking and climbing to hunting, fishing and forestry.

“It’s just an amazing organization and a real education because, again, the amount of trust and responsibility the adults gave the students was such a gift,” Tom says. “We were put in charge of pretty significant projects.”

An example: The summer after Tom’s freshman year, he and two fellow undergrads were responsible for rebuilding a long stretch of the Appalachian Trail that ran along the side of a mountain in New Hampshire. Dartmouth provided them with a course called “Wilderness Chainsaw Use,” taught by the U.S. Forest Service, then simply gave them a truck, tools and list of work. That summer they replaced rock steps, rebuilt water bars and built a bridge.

“It was incredible,” Tom says. “I teach at a university now and that would never happen now. Never, ever. And it doesn’t happen at Dartmouth the same way. There’s much more supervision.”

*Roofing a trail shelter in New Hampshire, 2007*.

Tom dedicated his time to the Outing Club’s Cabin and Trail division, which was responsible for maintaining almost 75 miles of Appalachian Trail (these days it’s less). Responsibilities included maintaining all the three-sided Adirondack shelters along the trail and their associated privies. During a meeting it was announced that the Cabin and Trail club’s Cabin Maintenance chair was studying abroad and they needed a replacement.

“For some reason I raised my hand not knowing anything,” Tom says. “And I got handed my first assignment, which was to replace two outhouses.”

As luck would have it, a man named Ira Friedrichs showed up at this same meeting. Ira wasn’t a student. An apprentice to Jay White Cloud, a master timber framer in Thetford Hill, Vermont, Ira was simply hoping to meet some people and maybe help out with a few projects. He and Tom hit it off, and Ira suggested they timber frame the privies together. Ira taught Tom Japanese timber framing and over spring break they pre-cut two small timber frames for the privies. Appalachian Trail regulations required the outhouses be wheelchair accessible, which meant each structure needed a 4′-wide circle. Despite using 2x4s and 4x4s, the frames were heavy. One of the privies was to be located a couple of miles in on a flat trail. Tom and Ira lashed the timbers to wheelbarrows and carts, hand carried them, and put them up in a weekend, hanging the walls on French cleats. The second outhouse, however, was on top of a mountain.

“And that was pretty brutal because we had to slog through mud and this dude was trying to help us with an ATV but that kept getting stuck,” Tom says. “So we’re skidding these timbers up and it was a disaster. But we got them up there eventually and we kind of bodged it together and it was fine.”

*Velvet Rocks Trail Shelter, Hanover, New Hamshire, Hemlock, 2007. Built in collaboration with Ira Friedrichs.*

Tom fell in love with timber framing. He and Ira timber framed the Appalachian Trail’s Velvet Rocks Shelter, and the summer after he graduated, Tom designed and timber framed a sugaring house for an organic farm. He felled the trees, worked with a local sawyer to mill them and erected it on site.

“That was just a really neat farm-to-table building experience,” Tom says.

An Open Woodshop

While at Dartmouth, Tom also had access to the Student Woodshop, located in Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts.

“It started in the ’20s and the story I heard was some alumnus said, ‘The men of Dartmouth are getting weak and not learning how to use their hands. I’m going to endow a woodshop so that they can remember what it is to be real men!’ You know, some bullshit like that. But the institution has definitely lasted and it’s just wonderful. It’s an enormous woodshop with wonderful tools and a full-time staff.”

There are no woodworking classes, rather the Student Woodshop is simply an open studio. Tom wanted to build a blanket chest so he checked it out. Staff including Greg Elder, director of the Student Woodshop, taught him how to use the tools, how to think about what’s needed to take rough lumber to square, and how to balance hand work with machine work.

“It was just an amazing privilege to have access to that and that just gave me such a bug,” Tom says.

Occasionally, Walker Weed, former director of the Student Woodshop, would come by to use a machine. Reed was a well-known New England studio woodworker who had been featured in Fine Woodworking, “a good legend and guiding light at that place,” Tom says.

Throughout college Tom made a bunch of little blanket and sea chests – a lot of machine dovetails, he says. After graduating in 2007, he sharpened tools at the Student Woodshop a few hours a week, giving him full access to the shop. Then, he started getting commissions. First was the sugaring house for the organic farm. Then Jay hired him to help build a small wing onto his house. And a local guy asked him to build a fly-tying desk.

“I just bit off way more than I could chew,” Tom says. “I made this really elaborate crazy-ass thing. The whole base was basically timber framed with all these big wedged through-tenons. And then the top was all hand-cut dovetails on this stepped, Tansu-looking series of little cabinets, all hand-cut dovetail drawers, and I think I asked for what at the time felt like an impossible price and then of course I ended up making about $3 an hour.”

During his senior year, Tom learned about a grant from Dartmouth’s art department: An alum had given money so that students could go to Europe and be inspired by architecture. That sounded pretty good to Tom so he applied and got the grant. After graduation he stuck around Hanover for about 10 months then bummed around Europe for three months, stretching the grant as long as he could.

Archival Clothing

Once back from Europe, Tom returned home to Eugene, where he lived for a few years part-time. He took occasional jobs at Dartmouth and traveled, and when in Eugene he worked as a prep cook in a French restaurant, later moving to the restaurant’s coffee shop where he slung espresso for a while. Around this time he reconnected with an old friend, Lesli Larson.

“She was a very influential person,” Tom says. “She loves old clothing, fishing and outdoor clothes, and she had this great blog called Archival Clothing. And we are just really good buds. We’d go on long-distance bike rides and chitchat about all the old clothing and ephemera that she had.”

Eventually, Tom and Lesli decided to make some things inspired by Lesli’s collection and sell it on Lesli’s blog. They found a sewing contractor in the Yellow Pages – T & J Custom Sewing & Design. The owners, Julie and Terry Shuck, turned out to be “amazing folks,” Tom says, and coached them through the conception-to-reality process.

First up was a bag. The Shucks asked for a drawing and material, and explained how the pricing would work. Using what he learned about technical drawing in his architecture studios, Tom drew up some pencil fashion plates and sewed some crude prototypes. With that, the Shucks made 20 bags, and Tom and Lesli put them up on Lesli’s blog. They immediately got snapped up.

“We thought, That’s really fun,” Tom says. “And then we just kept doing that. We did a bigger run of bags and a bigger run of bigger bags and we made backpacks and before you knew it we had a third business partner, one of Lesli’s college friends. And we had a full-on company on our hands called Archival Clothing.”

Tom began to look more closely at product design as a career. He applied and was accepted into the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, to earn a master’s of industrial design degree. His thesis was on the physical infrastructure of home cooking but his real education, he says, had more to do with the success of Archival Clothing.

“It was really good timing,” Tom says. “I moved in summer 2010, the peak fever of the men’s heritage trend. Everyone wanted Filson stuff and Barbour stuff and wax cotton this and heavy wool that and that has always been Lesli’s thing.”

Living in Brooklyn, Tom was able to go to New York Fashion Week events and meet with stylists. Archival Clothing did a co-op with Barneys New York. The company was mentioned in The New York Times. Tom met Archival Clothing’s Japanese, Scandinavian and other European distributors. He went to shows in Berlin.

“It was a really incredible education and I think I might have learned more doing the Archival Clothing stuff than in grad school just because it was so applied and so immediate,” Tom says. “It was just a phenomenal, and sometimes difficult, education in product design, production and sales.”

Tom says if he had his wits about him he would have been a little more consistent, studying domestic manufacturing of soft goods, for example, versus industrial design.

“One of my many foibles is over-enthusiasm that spreads me a little thin,” he says.

From Office to Classroom

Tom and Lesli are still best friends, but after some disagreements with their third business partner, Tom left Archival Clothing. In 2014 he got a job as design director at Best Made Co., where he was immediately thrown into the deep end, being tasked with designing everything from men’s shirting, outerwear and bottoms to steel storage solutions.

“The founder might have an idea for something and then with relatively limited marching orders I was responsible for making it happen,” he says.

He also learned some valuable lessons.

“I definitely had my share of fails where I just overpromised what I thought could happen and I had to learn a lot about being realistic in industry production and maybe not trusting everything that everyone says all the time,” he says. “I’m a very trusting person by nature and that definitely bit me in the ass a couple of times. But it was a great education, some super nice folks and I learned so much.”

About a year in, Tom was feeling burnt out. He was spending 50 to 60 hours a week in the office, in front of a computer. He missed making. So in 2015 he quit and teamed up with a friend, Anthony Zollo, to build custom furniture in New York, France and Sweden. Then, after six years in New York, he moved back to Oregon.

“I was ready to be somewhere with some trees,” he says. “Somewhere I could have a car and get out to the sticks a little bit better.”

Tom was building fences and decks while contemplating his next move when an Archival Clothing contact who worked at UO reached out and said that one of their product design adjuncts had just bailed. They wondered if Tom would be interested in teaching a studio in the upcoming term.

“One thing led to another and in no time flat I was teaching full time,” Tom says. “It was just an immediate fit. It just felt right.”

Teaching Studios, Building, Research & More

*Cedar Pavilion, Portland, Oregon, 2018*.

Teaching wasn’t entirely new to Tom, who had taught a number of timber frameing workshops in upstate New York, Oregon and California. After teaching just one studio at UO, he remembered how much he loved it.

“The students were so inspiring and awesome and the conversations were exciting and challenging – it was just an immediate good feeling.”

And while he always has side projects, Tom has been a career instructor ever since. In some of his classes in UO’s Product Design department, Tom introduced students to woodshop tools, teaching them how to use jointers, planers and table saws, and how to think critically about the tools and materials so they can design accordingly. The goal of these classes is not to crank out expert woodworkers but to teach process and materials, resulting in future designers who are more comfortable navigating different aspects of their career. Tom also taught students how to use industrial sewing machines, how fabric works and how to design bags and garments. Students would sew pouches, cases and totes, learning how to work though different seam constructions and how different materials function in different applications. In advanced studios, students tackled a single subject for the entire 10-week term.

“Last term I taught an advanced studio and I had students design headlamps,” he says. “And it was a great one because there are so many tiny details to attend to.”

The studio starts broad, with concept design and Tom asking questions: Why make this? There’s a lot of stuff in the landfills, do we really need this? Where does this fit in? He taught the students how to think critically about intuitive functioning, how to easily communicate multiple settings and how to make special considerations for niche users, such as runners. Students explored their concepts via sketches, models and technical drawings that become more refined with time.

Because of Tom’s professional background in soft goods, he frequently taught garment and bag design studios. Frustrated with the plastic Janome sewing machines in UO’s sewing studio, Tom helped build out a more legit lab with industrial machines.

This year a tenure-track position at UO’s satellite campus in Portland opened up, and Tom applied and was hired. The campus is home to fourth-year undergrads as well as two-year master’s students studying sports product design. Tom’s focus will be on soft goods, such as garments, shoes and bags.

“I’m really excited about it,” he says. “It’s going to be a big shift. I’ve been dating my partner, Karen, for two years now and we’ve been long distance. She lives in Portland. So I’m very excited to be finally moving in with her. And I’ve got a ton of friends in Portland because I’ve spent a lot of time up there. I’m very comfortable in the city so I know what I’m getting into. It doesn’t feel as scary as a move might be otherwise.”

When applying, Tom put a lot of thought into his proposal for his research project and how it might relate to the UO’s institutional hiring plan, which was focused on health and human performance, as well as environmental responsibility.

“I was applying to this program in sports product design but I wanted to come at my research at a really genuine angle,” Tom says. “I couldn’t say I wanted to design football cleats because that’s not my thing, it’s not my world. I would love to work with a student who is designing football cleats and I think I could do that very well, but myself?”

A love of outdoors has been the straight stitch in Tom’s life, something everything else has stemmed from, sometimes in surprising ways. Tom rooted his research proposal in ultra lightweight backcountry travel design concepts that could translate to other situations, such as wildland firefighting.

“That’s such a high-risk, high-demand, super-necessary job and those firefighters carry so much stuff,” he says. “Even if we could reduce that pack weight by just 10 to 15 percent, that would make a huge difference toward their health and human performance. But it’s all pretty new. I’m starting in the fall and we’ll see how the research goes.”

Designing for Lost Art Press

Tom had been following Christopher Schwarz and Megan Fitzpatrick’s work from afar as an enthusiastic woodworking for quite some time. While working at Best Made Co., Tom cold emailed Lost Art Press and said they were interested in selling Lost Art Press books online and in Best Made Co. stores, perhaps reaching a slightly different audience. The books sold well, particularly Christian Becksvoort’s “With the Grain.”

In 2015, while driving across country in his move from New York City to Oregon, Tom stopped in Indiana and took a class with Chris at Marc Adams School of Woodworking. That was their first time meeting in person. They got along well.

“We both like to bullshit and drink beer,” Tom says.

Tom noticed that Chris was wearing this great French chore coat. He told Chris to hit him up if he ever wanted to make chore coats.

“And that was it,” Tom says. “I’m not good at selling, being pushy with my services. I think that’s all I said. And maybe a year later he hit me up and was like, ‘Hey, let’s make a chore coat.’”

Together they produced a limited run of chore coats at a factory in Oregon. It’s still the favorite item Tom has designed for Lost Art Press.

“They were so nice,” Tom says. “That was the first round where we used this really, really fancy and horrifically expensive Japanese reverse sateen moleskin, which is this really lovely fabric. And the factory did the run and then they changed the pricing on us. Producing clothing is always very challenging. But the sales were great and we produced well over a thousand coats for Lost Art Press.”

These days he and Chris have focused more on workshop accessories, in part because workshop accessories don’t come in different sizes.

“I think it was a surprise for the Lost Art Press folks to see that 5 to 6 percent of the clothes just come right back,” Tom says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, guys. Sizes. Busts and arms and shoulders. It ain’t like a book.’”

Sew Valley in Cincinnati makes the plane and pencil pockets. Tom worked with Megan and Chris to not only make sure each pouch would function properly but that it could also be produced within Sew Valley’s capabilities.

“That’s such a big part of designing, just understanding what machines your suppliers have and therefore what kind of operations they can do with those machines,” Tom says.

Tom also enjoys designing bandanas for Lost Art Press.

“I love doing the hankies just because it’s a different prompt every time,” he says. “Chris and I will generally chat a little bit on the phone and then I get to doodle around and it’s just a fun way to get lost in some illustration and do something that just feels a little free. And the vendor we work with does a beautiful job. One Feather Press makes really nice work, really great printing and high-quality material. They just do a really nice job.”

Tom says the profit sharing Lost Art Press does with its authors and designers is unheard of.

“It’s so easy to work with Chris and Megan because they trust me and that is rare as a freelance designer, to be trusted,” he says. “And they are always down to try something and if it doesn’t work they’re like, ‘Cool. We tried it.’ No one is ever upset when we don’t achieve maximum profitability on something. It’s just a really special organization to work with. Chris walks his values in a way that I’ve almost never seen before. And don’t tell him I said that because he can’t take a compliment. It’s insane. It’s remarkable.”

A Shift

Tom is spending this summer getting his house in Eugene ready to rent and going on a couple of backcountry motorcycling trips in Oregon.

“There’s just so much public land, mountains and desert and forest here in Oregon that it’s just a great way to get around and see some cool country,” he says.

He also has a couple backpacking trips planned, and a trip to Ireland with his family to celebrate his mom’s birthday, who is from an Irish family but has never been. Karen, his partner, is really into fishing, so there will be a lot of that as well. And then Tom will move to Portland. Work starts in August, as he helps facilitate a campus move.

“It’s going to be a big year of change and I think it’s going to be really positive,” Tom says.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Frank Klausz’s Workbench

Posted on April 2, 2024March 15, 2024 by fitz

Frank Klausz’s new [in 1987] workbench is rooted in a venerable European tradition.

The following is excerpted from “The Workbench Book,” by Scott Landis.

First published in 1987, “The Workbench Book” remains the most complete book on the most important tool in the woodworker’s shop.

“The Workbench Book” is a richly illustrated guided tour of the world’s best workbenches — from a traditional Shaker bench to the mass-produced Workmate. Author and workbench builder Scott Landis visited dozens of craftsmen, observing them at work and listening to what they had to say about their benches. The result is an intriguing and illuminating account of each bench’s strengths and weaknesses, within the context of a vibrant woodworking tradition.

This fully illustrated guide features more than 275 photos of beautifully crafted workbenches as well as complete plans for four benches. “The Workbench Book” explores benches from around the world, from every historical era and for all of the common (and esoteric) woodworking specialties.

This 248-page hardbound edition from Lost Art Press ensures “The Workbench Book” will be available to future generations of woodworkers. Produced and printed in the United States, this classic text is printed on FSC-certified recycled paper and features a durable sewn binding designed to last generations. The 1987 text remains the same in this edition and includes a foreword by Christopher Schwarz.

I met Frank Klausz before I met his workbench. He was seated next to me in the front row during a lecture given by Ian Kirby (Chapter 6). Klausz himself was scheduled to speak about wood finishing the next day. Kirby’s talk centered on his workbench, an example of which he’d brought along. Although the bench had evolved out of Kirby’s own English tradition, from Klausz’s Hungarian perspective it was hardly a cabinetmaker’s bench at all. It had no tail vise and the front vise was of the metal, quick-action persuasion. Klausz fidgeted through most of Kirby’s talk, and at the first break he sprang from his chair and led me to the bench, where he passionately ennumerated his objections.

To understand the depth of Klausz’s convictions, you need to know about his background. Thirty years ago in Hungary, at the age of 14, Frank began his woodworking career in an apprenticeship system that had remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. What was unusual about it, even by European standards, was that Klausz entered into a formal, contractual apprenticeship with his own father. “I paid the highest price for my trade,” Klausz explains. “Once I apprenticed, I didn’t have a father, I had a master.” And a stern master at that. Of the half-dozen workers in his father’s cabinet shop, it was Frank who was taken to task if something wasn’t quite right. Perhaps wary of his own son’s competition, the elder Klausz withheld certain construction tips until the very end of Frank’s apprenticeship. Watching his father work, Frank asked, “How can you do that so fast?” His father replied, “After ten or fifteen years you’re gonna be a pretty good beginner yourself.”

At the end of four years, Frank became a certified journeyman cabinetmaker, on his way to becoming a master (which required one year of work in each of three different shops). Ten years later, Frank and his wife, Edith, packed their lives in three suitcases and left Hungary. Like the journeymen of old, Frank was on the road-except that his only tools were his hands and head, not chisels and saws in a toolbox strapped to his back. By 1969, the couple was living on Long Island, where Frank ran through a succession of jobs – carpentry, casework and so on – trying to find his way back to the work he’d trained to do. It was five more years before he could set up his own shop in a two-car garage in New Jersey. Finally, in 1985, Frank and Edith built the shop they’d been dreaming of.

I went to visit Frank in his Pluckemin, New Jersey, workshop and to meet his workbench in the flesh. My first and most startling impression was of the workshop itself. I had primed myself for an old-world sweatshop, with young apprentices chained to their benches. In Hungary, Frank’s father had two small workrooms-one for the benches and another (unheated, even in winter) for the machinery. When lumber had to be cut from a 20-ft. log, the workers fed it through an open window at one end of the machine shop, across the bandsaw and out again through the opposite window over rollers placed at the sill.

Klausz’s own shop couldn’t be more of the ‘new world.’ The single-story, cinder-block building sprawls a full 100 ft. in length. Painted off-white inside, it is bright and airy, with windows on all sides and large skylights. If Frank had mill a mast for the Constitution, I doubt that he’d even have to open a window.

Frank takes me on a quick tour of the shop to show me their work. While one of his four employees might be building a set of computer cabinets of walnut-faced plywood, another could be restoring an 18th-century English grandfather clock or stripping an office desk. At the far end of the building, we pause for a moment while Frank sprays the handrails for a casket he has built for an elderly client, whose house he has almost entirely restored. In the old country, Klausz explains, there was a cradle-to-grave relationship between the craftsman and his client. As his last commission for the deceased, the cabinetmaker would appear at the funeral, in his Sunday best, to drive the nails into the lid of the box. Clearly, a workbench in this shop needs to be versatile.

According to another old-world tradition, Frank explains, workbenches were passed on from one generation to another. The woodworker was the custodian, not the owner, of his bench – just as he was the custodian of the knowledge of his trade. The workbench took on a life of its own; it became somehow larger than the sum of the men who had planed upon it.

For Frank that chain had been broken. He had brought no workbench with him from Europe, and had to use commercially made benches for years, never having the time to make his own. But, when he found that there weren’t enough benches to go around in the new shop, he decided to build one. “The reason I made one is that you can’t buy one good enough,” he told me. It seemed to Frank that commercially made workbenches were growing smaller and lighter, even as they got more expensive. I also suspect it was Frank’s way of saying he’d come home.

Klausz, with a glued-up tail vise joined with hand-cut dovetails.

There wasn’t any guesswork or design involved when Frank built his bench. He didn’t reinvent the wheel. “It’s a copy,” he says. He had measured two benches at his father’s shop, a third in Vienna and another in Belgium. They were all within an inch of each other. “Apart from little touches like the stops and oil dish, the only difference I found was that some craftsmen treat their benches with loving care and some don’t …. Except for the metal vise screws, my bench is the same as my grandfather’s…. [The design] is so well worked out – if it hadn’t been good, Grandpa would have done something about it.”

When a customer enters Frank’s shop, he encounters the workbench, which also functions as a desk and business counter. Even if the visitor doesn’t comment on the bench, it’s a fair bet he’s noticed it. If Klausz could fit his workbench in his wallet, he would hand it out like a business card – it is his best foot and he puts it forward.

Klausz begins to explain his workbench by underlining a point too often overlooked-location. As the most important tool in the shop, the bench’s placement with respect to work flow (of materials, to and from machines, for finishing and so on) is crucial. Lighting is also important, and ideally should cast no shadows on the benchtop. Hand tools should be readily accessible. Frank’s are kept in a wall-mounted cabinet, only 5 ft. from the shoulder vise of the bench.

Of equal importance is the auxiliary set-up table near the bench, shown below. This low table is the right size (40 in. by 60 in. by 27 in. high) for all kinds of gluing, assembly or finishing. Anything that’s too messy or large for the workbench can be done on the table, leaving the benchtop free for trimming joints and other last-minute tasks. Rather than cluttering the main bench with drawers, Klausz built open shelves and storage bins in the base of the set-up table to hold hardware, small power tools and accessories.

This 27-in.-high set-up table is a versatile companion to Klausz’s bench. It helps organize hardware and portable power tools, and provides a nearby, convenient surface for gluing and finishing. Hardware is stored in 12 plastic bins, and three drawers pull out from beneath the 40-in. by 60-in. particleboard and plywood top.

In my travels I’d seen several variations on Klausz’s workbench, variously referred to as Scandinavian, Danish, Swedish and European. These workbenches all have as a common denominator the ‘dog-leg’ shoulder vise. I thought I had heard most of the arguments for and against this vise; as far as I had been able to discover, the only craftsmen who liked it were those who had trained on it, usually in strict apprenticeships.

I posed the same objections I’d heard to Klausz: The vise isn’t strong enough to withstand heavy clamping pressure. It’s awkward to work around the large corner. The pivoting clamping board often has to be held with one hand to keep it from binding as it’s wound in and out. You can’t clamp a board anywhere on the bench for crosscutting.

Frank’s initial response was a reflex: “If you’re a cabinetmaker, if you do casegoods, frames, if you plane, saw or sand wood, if you do dovetails … I can’t see anything quicker or better.” Later, he explained that the floating clamping board grips well on tapered stock, and one end of a long board (or a door) can be clamped firmly behind the screw while the other end is supported by the portable bench slave, shown at right. But it was only when I watched him dovetail a drawer that I truly began to appreciate the shoulder vise.

Through dovetails are one of the traditional cabinetmaker’s preferred joints, and when Frank cuts a dovetailed drawer he puts the bench through its paces. “Good craftsmen,” Frank says, “not only do things well, but do them with speed…. If you want to make a good joint, you can do it just about as fast by hand as with a machine, especially if you’re doing just one.” With the drawer parts milled to length and thickness, Frank uses a mortising gauge to scribe the thickness of the stock across the ends of the boards. Then he slaps the first piece-the drawer front or back – upright in the shoulder vise.

The quick-action feature of a Record vise is nice, Frank admits, but he rarely has to move the screw on his vise more than a single turn. Because there are no guide rods or screws running below the vise, a long board such as a drawer front can be clamped through the opening, not just gripped in the top few inches of the jaw or along one edge. The work won’t twist and there’s no need to block the other edge of the vise to keep the jaws parallel. (The clamping board pivots on the end of the screw to accept tapered work, and it should move freely without needing to be guided by hand.)

Klausz uses a bench slave (top) to support on end of a long board clamped in the shoulder vise. When he cuts dovetails (bottom) he clamps the board vertically in the shoulder vise, directly behind the screw. There are no guide rods to interfere with the work. He aligns his arm and body with the direction of the cut and, standing above it, he can keep an eye on both sides of the line.

At 33 in. high, Frank’s bench is lower than I’m used to, but the shoulder vise helps to compensate by allowing you to clamp work securely at many different heights. If it’s too high, it vibrates; if it’s too low, it’s uncomfortable. Frank holds the top edge of the drawer front about 4 in. or 5 in. off the bench –
a comfortable sawing height – and clamps the board tight. He wheels around to grab a backsaw from the tool cabinet and begins cutting pins – without stopping to lay them out. In about as much time as it took him to rip a bageI on the bandsaw during a coffee break, he defines all the pins at one end of the board with six sawcuts. Once the pins are cut on both ends of the drawer, front and back, the action moves to the other end of the bench. Frank C-clamps the part to be chopped in front of the tail vise – never on it. The force of the mallet blows is transferred directly through the leg to the floor. Whether he’s working on one drawer or six, all the parts are stacked and staggered, one on top of another, so that he has ready access to all the joints. At one point, Frank demonstrates how, during a full day of this work, he would drop to his knees to rest his back (there’s a rubber mat in front of the bench to provide a cushion). This places the work at his chest, instead of at his hip, and gives him a closer view as well.

To chop the pins, Klausz stacks the drawer sides and clamps them to the bench in front of the the vise.

Next, with the parts laid out on the benchtop, he marks the tails from the pins. Then he’s back at the shoulder vise to cut them out. During these operations, the tool tray holds the marking gauge, hacksaw, pencil, square, chisel and mallet-out of harm’s way but easily retrieved. The tray isn’t a repository for yesterday’s project, and Frank keeps it swept clean. Cutting dovetails by eye requires having your wits about you, or it won’t be long before you’re cutting pins on one end of a board and tails on the other. A clean, orderly benchtop is essential.

With the vise snugged tight, Klausz sets the benchdogs with a few smart laps on the end of the board and the head of the dog. A piece of scrap protects the board from the face of the metal dog.

Before the drawer is assembled, Frank planes the machine marks off the inside of each piece. He moves back to the other end of the bench and gently closes the tail vise on a drawer side, using a piece of scrap between the metal dogs and the ends of the board. It doesn’t take much pressure. The benchdogs do two jobs: they grab the wood and, because they’re angled, pull it down. Their down-clamping action is important, especially on thin stock, which will chatter if suspended in midair. To make the most of this feature, Frank taps down on each end of the board in front of the dog, seating it on the bench. He prefers metal dogs to wood because of their strength; they’re more effective at pulling the work down, and he can knock the dogs up an inch or more above the benchtop without having to worry about flexing or breaking them. The dogs can also be reversed and used to pull apart a piece of furniture. For this reason, the dogholes are cut at an 88° angle – any steeper and the dogs might slide out of their slots.

Klausz reverses the dogs in their holes and opens the tail vise gradually to take a chair apart for repair.

“When I plane, I use my body weight and just push down,” Frank explains. “This gives me hours of easy planing, without pushing and shoving.” The bench has to be the right height for this. To demonstrate his formula for bench height, Frank stands next to the bench with his arms at his side and his palms turned down – the benchtop grazes his palms. He is 6 ft. tall and his bench is less than 3 ft. high. Frank planes in two motions – a long, cutting, power stroke and a feathered return as he tilts the plane slightly to lift the blade off the wood and to resume position for the next cut. The bench doesn’t move under the pressure of his strokes.

Sometimes if a piece is small, Frank glues up right on the bench, spreading a cloth to protect the top. But more often, he turns to the set-up table behind the bench. A quick swipe with a wet rag removes any errant drops.

When the glue is dry, he planes the drawer sides by gripping the frame in the front jaw of the tail vise. The other end of the drawer, which sticks out from the vise, can be supported at any height by the bench slave.

To finish the job, Frank planes the top and bottom edges of the drawer flush. He reclamps the drawer flat on the bench between dogs-using the front doghole in the tail vise when he can and keeping the vise opening small. “You want to have the workpiece on the bench as n1uch as possible, not on the vise,” he says. “It puts less stress on the vise itself. The strongest support is up front, over the legs.”

Klausz’s drawer demonstration answered many of my doubts about the shoulder vise: It doesn’t need to be immensely strong, because the screw is always centered behind the workpiece. Whatever inherent awkwardness exists in its design is at least partially offset by this convenient feature, which cannot be found on any other conventional front vise. The clamping board rarely binds in everyday use, because generally it is adjusted in small increments, and it’s the only vise I know of that clamps non-square stock as easily as square stock.

This flip-up padauk stop is all that is needed to hold most boards for crosscutting.

I had one final reservation, though. There’s no easy way to clamp a board for crosscutting anywhere on the bench. “You don’t have to,” Klausz says. All that’s necessary is a small stop, and he flips up the pivoting bench stop at the right end of the bench and pushes a board against it to demonstrate. Its location on the right end of the bench is also more convenient for a right-handed worker than crosscutting off of the left end.

If my own reservations about the bench were mainly resolved, it was clear that Frank had none at all. “If you’re a cabinetmaker, you should have a bench like this,” he said.

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